"YOU CAME HERE TO SUFFER"

"YOU CAME HERE TO SUFFER"
The H-2A Farm Worker Program creates a pipeline of cheap, disposable labor.
By David Bacon
The Progressive, June 1, 2018
http://progressive.org/magazine/you-came-here-to-suffer/

ROYAL CITY, WA - H2A guest workers string up wire supports for planting apple trees, in an field owned by Stemilt Growers.  Carlos Gutierrez and Eduardo Lopez are immigrant contract workers recruited in Mexico.  They will work a few months, and then will have to return to Mexico.


On August 6 of last year, Honesto Silva Ibarra died in a Seattle hospital. Silva was a guest worker-a Mexican farm worker brought to the United States under contract to pick blueberries. He worked first in Delano, California, and then in Sumas, Washington, next to the Canadian border. His death, and the political and legal firestorm it ignited, has unveiled a contract labor scheme reminiscent of the United States' infamously exploitative mid-century Bracero Program.

In a suit filed January in the U.S. District Court in Washington State, the state's rural legal aid group, Columbia Legal Services charges that Silva's employer, Sarbanand Farms, "violated federal anti-trafficking laws through a pattern of threats and intimidation that caused its H-2A workforce to believe they would suffer serious harm unless they fully submitted to Sarbanand's labor demands."

Those demands, as described in the complaint, were extreme, and Silva's coworkers believe he died as a result.

Sarbanand Farms belongs to Munger Brothers, a family corporation in Delano, California. Since 2006, the company has annually brought more than 600 workers from Mexico under the H-2A visa program to harvest 3,000 acres of blueberries in California and Washington. Munger, the largest blueberry grower in North America, is the driving force behind the growers' cooperative that markets under the Naturipe label.

Companies using the H-2A program must apply to the U.S. Department of Labor, listing the work and living conditions and the wages workers will receive. The company must provide transportation, housing, and food. Workers are given contracts for less than one year, and must leave the country when their work is done. They can only work for the company that contracts them, and if they lose that job they must leave immediately.

According to the lawsuit complaint, workers were told that they had to pick two boxes of blueberries an hour or they'd be sent back to Mexico. In July and August, they were working twelve-hour shifts. The complaint says managers routinely threatened to send them home if they failed to meet the quota, and to blacklist them afterwards, preventing them from returning to the U.S. to work in subsequent years. One manager told them, "You came here to suffer, not for vacation."

ROYAL CITY, WA- A sign on the gate restricting access to the barracks in central Washington housing contract workers brought to the U.S. by growers under the H2A visa program by the Green Acres company.


Laboring in the rows under the hot sun, breathing smoke in the air from wildfires, many workers complained of dizziness and headaches. Nidia Perez, a Munger supervisor, purportedly told workers that "unless they were on their death bed," they could not miss work. Silva told a supervisor he was sick. The company, in a statement, said he had diabetes and "received the best medical care and attention possible as soon as his distress came to our attention." But fellow worker Miguel Angel Ramirez Salazar, gave a different account: "They said if he didn't keep working he'd be fired for 'abandoning work,' but after a while he couldn't work at all."

Silva collapsed, was taken to a local clinic, and then to the hospital where he died. CSI Visa Processing, the firm that recruited the workers in Mexico for Munger, later posted a statement on its website, saying "the compañero who is hospitalized, the cause was meningitis, an illness he suffered from before, and is not related to his work." Nidia Perez was the liaison between Munger Farms and CSI.

While Silva was in the hospital, sixty of his coworkers decided to protest. On August 4, they stayed in the labor camp instead of leaving for work. In addition to the production quota, they were angry about the food. The complaint says they were being charged $12.07 a day for meals, but the food sometimes ran out. When workers were fed, a supervisor marked their hands with "X" so they couldn't go back for more. They were forbidden to eat in the fields.

As the protestors sat in the camp, one worker called the Department of Labor, which sent out an inspector. The next day, when they tried to go back to work, company supervisors called out strikers by name and fired them for "insubordination." Perez told them they had an hour to get out of the labor camp before the police and immigration authorities would be called. Supervisors stood in front of the barracks, periodically calling out how much time was left.

Workers set up an impromptu encampment nearby with the help of Washington State's new farm worker union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. After a few days, all eventually had to return to Mexico.

YAKIMA, WA- Members of the Yakima Nation of Native Americans join farm workers and other immigrants and community and labor activists marching through Yakima to celebrate May Day.


The death and firings at Sarbanand Farms highlight the explosive growth of this contract labor program. In 2006, U.S. employers were certified to recruit 59,112 workers under H-2A visas. Washington State certified only 814 H-2A positions that year. But by 2015, the numbers had mushroomed. Nationally, employers were certified to bring in 139,832 workers, including 12,081 in Washington State alone. Last year, Washington accounted for 18,535 workers out of 200,049 nationally.

Driving this growth are some very big operators. CSI (Consular Solutions Inc.), the recruiter for Munger Farms, is probably the largest single recruiter of H-2A workers from Mexico. The company, originally called Manpower of the Americas, was created to bring workers from Mexico for what is today the largest H-2A employer-the North Carolina Growers Association. The group was founded in 1989 by Stan Eury, who formerly worked for North Carolina's unemployment office, which plays a role in H-2A certification. Eury also created the North Carolina Growers Association PAC, a political action committee that donates almost exclusively to Republicans.

Under pressure from Eury, courts have concluded that anti-discrimination laws don't apply to H-2A workers. Employers are allowed to recruit men almost entirely. In 2001, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act does not cover workers recruited in other countries, leaving employers free to give preference to young workers able to meet high production quotas. In 2009, he challenged Obama Administration efforts to strengthen H-2A worker protections.

North Carolina Legal Aid battled Eury for years over complaints of wage theft, discrimination, and bad living and working conditions, until he signed a collective bargaining agreement with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in 2004.

Despite his political clout, in 2015 Eury was forced to plead guilty to two counts of defrauding the U.S. government, fined $615,000 and was sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Nevertheless, the North Carolina Growers Association has been allowed to continue; last year, the Department of Labor approved its applications for 11,947 workers.

ROYAL CITY, WA- Jose Luis Sosa Sanchez and his fellow H2A contract workers in the kitchen of the barracks where they live in central Washington.


Meanwhile, CSI became a recruitment behemoth, supplying workers far beyond North Carolina. Its website boasts that it recruits more than 25,000 workers annually, through its network of offices in Mexico. A CSI handout for employers says "CSI has designed a system that is able to move thousands of workers through a very complicated U.S. Government program."

Workers recruited through CSI must sign a form acknowledging that their employer can fire them for inadequate performance, in which case they will have to return to Mexico. "The boss must report me to the authorities," it warns, "which can obviously affect my ability to return to the U.S. legally in the future."

Joe Morrison, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services, notes that H-2A workers are inherently vulnerable for several reasons. "Virtually all have had to get loans to support their families until they can begin sending money home, as well as to cover the cost of visas and transportation," he explains. "That basically makes them indentured servants. They have the least amount of legal protection, even less than undocumented immigrants."

H-2A workers are also excluded from the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and beholden to one employer. "Even undocumented workers can vote with their feet if they don't like the job," Morrison says. "If H-2A workers complain, they get fired, lose their housing, and have to leave the country."

Many H-2A workers feel conflicted about their situation.

WAPATO, WA- After work Francisco Ramos, an H2A guest worker, talks with his wife and children in Mexico. These barracks belong to the Green Acres company.  Ramos' wife and three children live in the municipo of Ajutla in Oaxaca, Mexico, and he keeps their photos in his phone.


"We have papers, so we don't feel in danger," said Jose Luis Sosa Sanchez in a recent interview, at in a camp belonging to Stemilt Growers near Royal City, Washington. But he and other workers can't buy property and establish a sense of connection to the community.

"We just come to work. That's all," he says. And there is no time-and-a half for working more than eight hours. "We work six days, and sometimes seven. And the work here is hard. You're really exhausted at the end of the day."

Sosa expressed sadness over being separated from his family, including two young daughters. "It's hard to be far away from them, but what can I do? To move ahead I have to do this. So I talk with them on the phone. What else can I do? Every three days or so, in the afternoon after work. My wife says she feels OK, but who knows?"

Sergio Alberto Ponce Ponce, staying in the same barracks, had similar feelings. "I miss my wife. I've never been apart from her before. We sleep in each other's arms, but here, no. I call her every day. She'll send me a text, and then I'll call her the next chance I get-in a break at work or at lunch, and when I get back after work before it gets dark."

Ponce looked forward to going home to Mexico, but plans to return. "I'm going to keep working like this for as long as I can," he says. "I'd like to live here, but I have my family there."

ROYAL CITY, WA- H2A contract worker Sergio Alberto Ponce Ponce in the kitchen of the barracks of Stemilt Growers.


In 2013, representatives of the Washington Farm Labor Association, originally part of the Washington State Farm Bureau now called WAFLA, showed up at a large Washington State winery, Mercer Canyons. Garrett Benton, manager of the grape department and viticulturist, was then given a plan by the company owners for hiring workers for the following season.

"The plan separated out work to be done by the H-2A workers and work to be done by the local farm workers," Benton recalled in a declaration for a suit filed by Columbia Legal Services. "It left very little work for the local farm workers. Based on the plan and the presentation by the WAFLA people, I believed it was a done deal that the company would be bringing in H-2A workers in 2013."

The rules governing the H-2A program require employers to first advertise the jobs among local residents. Local workers must be offered jobs at the same pay the company plans to offer H-2A workers, and the H-2A workers must be paid at a rate that supposedly will not undermine the wages of local workers. That wage rate is set by the unemployment agency in each state, and is usually slightly above minimum wage.

But there is virtually no policing of the requirement that growers demonstrate a lack of local workers, or any efforts to hire them beyond a notice at the unemployment office.

Benton said many of Mercer Canyons' longtime local workers were told there was no work available, or were referred to jobs paying $9.88/hour while H-2A workers were being hired at $12/hour. The company, he said, even reduced the hours of those local workers it did hire in order to get them to quit.

WAPATO, WA- Luis Arias, an immigrant from Michoacan, Mexico, thins apricots so that the fruit on the tree will have space to grow.


"Working conditions got so bad for the local workers that they eventually went on strike on May 1, 2013," Benton stated. "They felt strongly that they were being given harder, less desirable work for less pay.... Mercer Canyons was doing everything it could to discourage local farm workers from gaining employment." The class-action lawsuit involving more than 600 farmworkers was settled a year ago, and Mercer Canyons agreed to pay workers $545,000 plus attorneys' fees, for a total of $1.2 million.

In central Washington, the barracks springing up for H-2A workers all look the same-dusty tan prefab buildings built around a common grass area. Billboards next to rural roads advertise the services of companies including "H-2A Construction Inc." This is a product of WAFLA's aggressive growth strategy.

"Our goal is to have 50,000 H-2A workers on the West Coast three years from now," WAFLA's director Dan Fazio told Michigan apple growers in 2015. In 2016, the group took in $7.7 million in fees for its panoply of H-2A services. It handles program application and compliance, provides transportation, recruits workers and gets their visas processed, and conducts on-site meetings with them.

The premise behind the H-2A program is that it allows recruitment of workers by an individual grower who demonstrates it can't find people to hire locally. Workers are then bound to the grower, and don't function as a general labor pool. But a labor pool is exactly what WAFLA advertises. 

WAFLA's "shared contract model" lets multiple growers share the same group of workers during the same harvest season. Workers might work for one grower one day, and another the next, at widely separated fields. The "sequential model" lets growers bring in workers for one harvest, and then pass them on to another grower for another harvest.

ROYAL CITY, WA- Barracks under construction in central Washington built to house contract workers brought to the U.S. by growers under the H2A visa program. 


In its annual report for 2014, WAFLA boasted about helping block a proposed Department of Labor rule to make employers who use the H-2A program provide housing for family members of domestic workers. "Can you imagine a worker with a family of six demanding housing for his family a month after the start of the season when nearly all beds are full?" it asked.

WAFLA has a close relationship with the Washington State Employment Security Department. Craig Carroll, the agency's agricultural program director overseeing H-2A certification, spoke at the group's "H-2A Workforce Summit" in January 2017, sharing the stage with numerous WAFLA staff members and Roxana Macias, CSI's director of compliance. Macias herself worked for the department for two years, and then for WAFLA for three years, before moving to CSI.

While the Employment Security Department is charged with enforcing the rules regarding H-2A contracts, its website states: "The agriculture employment and wage report will no longer be provided beginning with the May 2014 report due to a decline in funding." The department did request an investigation by the state attorney general into charges by Columbia Legal Services that WAFLA had tried to fix wage rates at a low level. That investigation is still pending.

Washington State also helps WAFLA by allowing it to use state subsidies for low-income farm worker housing to build barracks. This includes the ninety-six-bed Ringold Seasonal Farmworker Housing in Mesa, Washington. Subsidies were used to build another grower association's $6 million, 200-bed complex called Brender Creek in Cashmere, Washington.

Daniel Ford at Columbia Legal Aid complained about these handouts to the Washington Department of Commerce, noting that the state's own surveys showed that 10 percent of Washington farm workers were living outdoors in a car or in a tent, and 20 percent were living in garages, shacks, or "places not intended to serve as bedrooms." Corina Grigoras, the department's Housing Finance Unit managing director, responded that she couldn't "prohibit H-2A farmworkers residing in housing funded through the Housing Assistance Program," or even "require that housing assistance program housing be rented to H-2A employers only at market rates."

BURLINGTON, WA - In 2013 migrant farm workers went on strike against Sakuma Farms, a large berry grower in northern Washington State, and blocked the entrance into the labor camp where they live during the picking season.  The strikers wanted to stop the grower from bringing in H-2A workers from Mexico to do the work they usually do every year.


Rosalinda Guillen, executive director of Community2Community, a farm worker advocacy organization in Bellingham, Washington, says "the impact of this system on the ability of farm workers to organize is disastrous."

In 2013, when Sakuma Brothers Farms' longtime resident workers went on strike for at least $14 an hour, they were told that the company would not exceed the H-2A wage rate of  $12.39. In effect, the guest worker rate was used as a ceiling to keep wages from going up. Familias Unidas por la Justicia was organized during that strike. Its president, Ramon Torres, met the H-2A workers Sakuma had hired, "they said that they'd been told that if they talked with us they'd be sent back to Mexico," he remembered.

After the 2013 harvest, strikers received form letters telling them they'd been fired. Sakuma Brothers Farms then applied for 438 H-2A workers, enough to replace its entire workforce, saying it couldn't find local labor.  Familias Unidas collected letters from the strikers saying they were available to work, and turned them in to the Department of Labor.  Sakuma Brothers Farms withdrew the H-2A application, and had to rehire the strikers.  Because the workers saved their jobs, the union survived and finally signed its first contract last year. 

After the events last year that led to Silva's death, workers at Sarbanand Farms reached out to the new union and joined it during their protest. But Sarbanand insists that H-2A workers have no such organizing rights, saying in a statement: "Their H-2A employment contracts specifically state that they are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement, and H-2A regulations do not otherwise allow for workers engaging in such concerted activity." The statement added that when employees quit or are terminated, "the employer is not responsible for the worker's return transportation or subsistence cost, and the worker is not entitled to any payment guarantees."

In response to the organizing effort by Community2Community and Familias Unidas, growers launched a website to argue their case.  It claims, "The guest worker program provides higher pay for guest and domestic workers, plus the highest level of protection for workers anywhere." It features a photo of Guillen, accusing her of "outrageous lies against the Sumas farm." It says Silva died of "untreated diabetes," of which the company was "unaware."

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Sakuma Farms striker Anselmo Aguilar is accompanied by Sarait Martinez of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, as they go to the Department of Labor in San Francisco to protest the company's application to import H2A guest workers after their strike.


While the website conveys a certain desperate tone, most growers seem optimistic about the H2-A program's future, due in part to the election of Donald Trump as President. While Trump has railed against some guest worker programs, especially the H-1B program used extensively by the high-tech industry, he has been conspicuously silent about H-2A. In fact, Trump's family employs H-2A workers on its Virginia vineyard. And the H-2A program is popular among some of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, GOP House Majority Leader.

"We are very positive about the Trump Administration," WAFLA head Dan Fazio said at a meeting of his group in early 2017. "I don't think there is a person in this room who voted for President Trump who wouldn't vote for him again tomorrow."

Last fall, U.S. Representative Bob Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, introduced a bill to expand the H-2A program. The bill, HR 4092, would create an H-2C visa category to replace H-2A, certifying the recruitment of 450,000 workers annually, a cap that would grow by 10 percent a year. Growers could employ workers year-round and re-enroll them for the following year while they are still in the country. Eventually up to 900,000 guest workers could be employed in the United States at any one time. Wages would be based at 115 percent of the federal or state minimum wage, or $8.34 an hour in states with the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

As the Trump Administration beefs up raids and enforcements, growers want to ensure a continued supply of cheap labor.

"ICE does audits and raids, and then growers demand changes that will make H2-A workers even cheaper by eliminating wage requirements, or the requirement that they provide housing," charges United Farm Workers Vice-President Armando Elenes. "Reducing the available labor and the increased use of H2-A are definitely connected. Growers don't want to look at how they can make the workplace better and attract more workers. They just want what's cheaper."

YAKIMA, WA- The hands of Manuel Ortiz, who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a bracero in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and spent decades working as a farm worker in California and Washington, show a life of work.


David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist, whose latest book is In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte (Colegio de la Frontera Norte - University of California Press).

GROWING PAINS - Part Two

GROWING PAINS - Part Two
Guest farm workers face exploitation, dangerous conditions.
By David Bacon
Capital and Main, 6/6/18
https://capitalandmain.com/growing-pains-guest-farm-workers-face-dangerous-conditions-0606
The American Prospect, 6/8/18
http://prospect.org/article/growing-pains-0

The influx of migrant agricultural workers brought to the U.S. on temporary visas means increased competition for resident laborers - and less bargaining power. The H-2A temporary agricultural program allows employers to bring workers from other countries, mainly Mexico, for temporary farm labor in the U.S. The workers are given visas that allow them to work in the U.S. but tie them to the employer that recruits them. Part 1 of this story explored unsafe working conditions and the explosive growth of the program.

Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. The American Prospect is co-publishing this piece.

SANTA MARIA, CA - This trailer was listed as the housing for six workers by La Fuente Farming, Inc. All photos by David Bacon.


H-2A Workers Cheated and Housed Like Sardines

A legal challenge in Santa Maria, also brought by CRLA, highlighted the cost of the H-2A program to the H-2A workers themselves. In 2013 a pair of recruiters showed up in the Mexican state of Michoacán, promising jobs in California with free housing and transportation. To get the jobs, however, recruits had to pay a deposit of $1,500 each into the bank account of labor contractor Jorge Vasquez. 

Charging recruitment fees is a violation of federal H-2A regulations. Nevertheless, Jose Raul Gonzalez, Efrain Cruz, Ana Teresa Cruz and Rosaura Chavez paid the money and went to Tijuana to wait for their visas. There they were taken to a house where 12 recruits slept in each room. The workers had to wait six weeks before they finally crossed the border. Then their passports were taken away. Their recruiter, Vasquez's nephew Diego, said they'd get them back only after they came up with an additional $1,500.

Vasquez told them they couldn't leave the residence except to go to work, threatening them with deportation and saying he could hurt their families in Mexico.

The four wound up in Santa Maria picking strawberries, housed in a two-bedroom residence with 14 to 16 other H-2A workers. Each paid $80 a week for housing and food-another legal violation. Vasquez told them they couldn't leave the residence except to go to work, threatening them with deportation and saying he could hurt their families in Mexico. Every day they were dropped off at the fields at 4 a.m. and worked until 3 to 5 p.m. They picked 30 to 35 boxes of berries a day, at $1 per box, but their first week's pay was only $200. They were paid in cash, with no pay records. At the AEWR wage at the time, they should have been paid $721.

The second week they weren't paid at all. Instead, they were told their pay was going towards their $1,500 "debt." When Chavez asked to leave, Diego told him that he had to continue working until the debt was paid. Finally one of them escaped. The other three worked for two more weeks. After each deposited $1,500 into Vasquez's account, they were fired and thrown out of the house.

On May 17 Vasquez and two others were indicted by the Department of Justice and arrested for charging workers for visas and making false promises that the visas would last for three years. Since 2012 they have filed petitions for over 350 workers.

SANTA MARIA, CA - This complex at 1316/1318 Broadway in Santa Maria was listed as the housing for 160 workers by Big F Company, Inc. and Savino Farms. It was formerly senior housing, and the contractor built a wall around it, with a gate controlling who enters and leaves.


Bad housing conditions for H-2A workers are not unusual. Last October the city of Santa Maria filed suit against a local slumlord, Dario Pini, over extreme violations of health and housing codes in hundreds of apartments in eight complexes. One of them, the Laz-E-Daze Boardinghouses at 1300, 1308, 1318 and 1324 North Broadway, is used as housing for H-2A workers. There city inspectors cited Pini for "deteriorated concrete walkways, accumulated trash, abandoned inoperable vehicles, plumbing leaks, unpermitted construction work, bedbug infestation, cockroach infestation, lack of hot water, faulty and hazardous electrical systems and broken windows and missing window screens."

Two H-2A labor contractors list 1318 North Broadway as company housing in their applications for certification by the Department of Labor. Big F Company says 80 workers live there, and Savino Farms has 60 more. Other certification forms list even more questionable housing. La Fuente Farming Inc. lists one small dwelling at 403 W. Creston St. as housing for 14 workers. A completely tumble-down derelict trailer next to a strawberry field at 1340 Prell St. is listed as housing for six workers, also by La Fuente Farming. There is no record that the Department of Labor or the Employment Development Department actually examined the housing employers said they were providing.

Meanwhile, Santa Maria rents are rising. According to CRLA attorney Corrie Arellano, growers and contractors bring about 800 workers into the Santa Ynez Valley each year. "At first they filled up almost all the inexpensive motel rooms in town," she said. "Now they're renting out houses and apartments, and pushing up rents." Francisco Lozano, a Mixtec farm worker and community activist, and longtime Santa Maria resident, says his rent for a two-bedroom apartment has gone from $1,000 to $1,300 in three years. Mixtecos are an indigenous population in Mexico, whose language and culture long pre-date European colonization. A large percentage of California farm workers today are migrants from Mixteco and other indigenous Mexican towns.

"Our Mixteco community is upset for two reasons," he explained. "We struggled with the school district to get them to hire a Mixtec-speaking translator for our children, some of whom don't speak Spanish. But the new H-2A workers are all single men who leave after the harvest is over, so they have no stake in the schools or our families. In addition, Mixteco farm workers used to organize short strikes at the beginning of every picking season to push up piece rates and wages. Now people are afraid that if we do that the growers will bring in H-2A workers. I think H-2A is a kind of modern slavery."

Similar community concerns are reflected in a study of housing conditions in Salinas made by demographer Rick Mines, "The Social Impact of the H2A Program in the Salinas/Pajaro Valleys."

"There is a growing competition between the new migrants (the H-2A) and the old (the settled Mexican families)," he says. "This competition affects the availability of housing as the older migrants face higher prices and increased crowding in the apartments where most live. But, more importantly perhaps, the older settled workers will be getting less work as their younger co-nationals (the H2A) replace them in the fields." By one estimate, half of the strawberry workers in the Salinas-Watsonville area are H-2A workers.

SANTA MARIA, CA - Francisco Lozano, a Mixtec farm worker and community activist, with his wife at home in Santa Maria.


In Salinas two of California's largest vegetable growers, Tanimura & Antle and the Nunes Company, are building new worker housing. These complexes are similar to those being rapidly constructed by growers in Washington state for their H-2A workers. While the Tanimura complex, with 800 beds, was made available to local residents, and the Nunes family says it may do the same with its 600 beds, both complexes eventually will likely become housing for H-2A workers. Tanimura already brings 800 H-2A workers into Yuma, Arizona, every year.

The regulation that originally required each employer to advertise jobs to local residents first, and allowed them to recruit H-2A workers only if there was no local labor available, has been drastically altered. Today labor contractors are allowed to apply for certifications, recruit workers and then move them from grower to grower, field to field. In effect, these contractors employ a flexible labor pool they place at the disposal of many growers. The assertion that they've tried to find local labor is just that-an unchecked assertion.

Last year Fresh Harvest Inc. was certified for 4,623 H-2A workers, and Elkhorn Packing Co. for 2,653. Fresh Harvest calls itself "one of the largest H-2A employers in the Western United States." Its website has a special section where potential recruits in Mexico can register, with a schedule of recruitment events at offices in San Quintín, Baja California, and Zamora, Michoacán. Fresh Harvest manages the recruitment, certification and visa processing for growers, sets up housing, trains workers, files all government reports, and provides worker transportation. "We insist on taking an active role in the in-field/job site management of our employees," the site claims. The company's owner, Steve Scaroni, predicts that this year Fresh Harvest will bring over 7000 workers into California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and Colorado, housing them in motels, apartments and labor camps.

Elkhorn Packing's website describes the company as "a leading custom harvester with operations in the Salinas Valley, Santa Maria, El Centro, and Yuma regions." With a contract labor force of thousands of H-2A workers dispersed that widely, it is unlikely that the individual growers whose fields it harvests have each determined separately that no local workers are available.

Using Immigration Enforcement to Expand H-2A

While growers' use of the H-2A program has increased sharply, immigration raids in rural areas of California have increased as well, especially following the election of President Trump.

While growers' use of the H-2A program has increased sharply, immigration raids in rural areas of California have increased as well, especially following the election of President Trump. The high visibility of the Border Patrol in farm worker towns was dramatized in March by the deaths of an immigrant couple in Delano, who crashed their van while fleeing in terror from immigration agents. Over the last six months the Department of Homeland Security has initiated document checks leading to the firing of hundreds of workers at several large San Joaquin Valley farms, including Pitman Family Farms and Poindexter Nut Company in Sanger, Bee Sweet Citrus in Fowler, and Fresh Select in Dinuba.

Grower concern about maintaining a stable workforce has been exacerbated by threats from the President to build more border walls, and to use the E-Verify database to identify undocumented workers for termination or deportation. WGA President Nassif, who belongs to Trump's agricultural advisory board, argues that this increased immigration enforcement is restricting the number of immigrant workers. That complaint, in turn, provides a rationale for expanding the H-2A program, reducing its requirements, and even redrafting the contract labor scheme entirely. 

Replacing undocumented workers with H-2A recruits is not a new idea. In 2010 immigration authorities went through the payroll records of one of Washington State's largest apple growers, Gebbers Farms, and identified 550 people they said had no legal immigration status. After the company fired them, it was then encouraged to use the H-2A program. According to Gebbers manager Jon Wyss, "Our first year, we hired 300 workers from Jamaica and 750 workers from Mexico for a total 1,150 H-2A workers." By 2017 Gebbers was bringing more than 2,000 H-2A workers, Wyss testified to the House Immigration Subcommittee.

That committee was considering a bill sponsored by Virginia Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte, chair of the Judiciary Committee, called the Agricultural Guestworker Act. Goodlatte explained its goal: "A reliable, efficient, and fair program that provides American farmers access to a legal, stable supply of workers ... [in] a new, flexible, and market-driven guest worker program."

That bill would have provided employers with 450,000 workers yearly under a new H-2C visa at states' minimum wages, or 115 percent of the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. Ten percent of workers' wages would be withheld, and could be collected at the U.S. consulate only after returning to their home country. The proposal would have eliminated requirements that growers provide transportation and housing, and allowed them to employ guest workers year around, so long as they returned to the border every year to "touch back" before returning to their jobs. 

SANTA MARIA, CA - Bars on the windows of the complex at 1316/1318 Broadway, listed as the housing for H-2A guest workers.


In January, Goodlatte incorporated the guest worker bill into a larger immigration bill, the Securing America's Future Act. It would eliminate family-based visas for parents, children, brothers and sisters of legal immigrants and citizens. Guest workers would be prohibited from bringing their families with them. All employers would have to use the E-Verify system to identify and fire all undocumented workers.

"The White House right now is fully committed to the Goodlatte bill and trying to pass [it] out of the House," a spokesperson told the Washington Times in February. President Trump owns a Virginia vineyard that employs H-2A workers, and won strong support from rural agricultural areas of California increasingly dependent on guest worker labor.  Some of the state's most powerful Republican congressmen have roots in agribusiness, including Jeff Denham, Devin Nunes, and David Valadao. The House Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, represents Bakersfield and Kern County.

The Western Growers Association declined to support the Goodlatte bill, saying its touch-back provision was unworkable and its 410,000 annual guestworker limit too low.  However, H-2A contractors like the Washington Farm Labor Association (WAFLA) are optimistic. "We are very positive about the Trump administration. I was in D.C. in December and met with the transition team, and our industry lobbyists have followed up," WAFLA head Dan Fazio told a meeting of growers not long after the election, the Seattle Times' Hal Bernton reported.  "I don't think there is a person in this room who voted for President Trump who wouldn't vote for him again tomorrow."

The Trump administration isn't simply waiting for Congress to decide on the Goodlatte bill. On May 24 the secretaries of Agriculture, Homeland Security, State and Labor issued an "H-2A Agricultural Worker Visa Modernization Joint Cabinet Statement" promising to change the program rules "in a way that is responsive to stakeholder concerns and that deepens our confidence in the program as a source of legal and verified labor for agriculture." While the promise is unspecific, changed regulations could do away with guarantees of housing and transportation, AEWR wage rates, and protections for resident farm workers-all changes growers have advocated. The statement also says the administration "plans to incentivize farmers' use of the E-Verify program." Requiring growers to use E-Verify to identify undocumented employees and fire them could lead to hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs, given that about half the farm labor workforce of two million people have no legal immigration status.

United Farm Workers national vice president Armando Elenes, however, condemned the political agenda that combines increased immigration enforcement with rising use of the H-2A program. "There's a huge explosion of H-2A in California," he said. "ICE does audits and raids, and then growers demand changes that will make H2-A workers even cheaper, by eliminating wage requirements or the requirement that they provide housing. Reducing the available labor and the increased use of H2-A are definitely connected."

GROWING PAINS - Part One

GROWING PAINS - Part One
Guest farm workers face exploitation, dangerous conditions.
By David Bacon
Capital and Main, 6/6/18
https://capitalandmain.com/guest-farm-workers-face-exploitation-0605
The American Prospect, 6/8/18
http://prospect.org/article/growing-pains-0


Many migrant workers in California on H-2A temporary agricultural visas are forced to contend with unsafe working conditions, wage theft and other labor law violations. The H-2A temporary agricultural program allows employers to bring workers from other countries, mainly Mexico, for temporary farm labor in the U.S. The workers are given visas that allow them to work in the U.S. but tie them to the employer that recruits them. Part 2 of this story documents Migrant workers housed like sardines, and the use of immigration enforcement to expand the H-2A visa program.

Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. The American Prospect is co-publishing this piece.

CAMP PENDLETON, CA - H2-A guest workers pick tomatoes for grower Harry Singh. Workers are kept behind fences where union and legal aid workers can't reach them. All photos by David Bacon.


Tomato grower Harry Singh had an idea for speeding up the harvest in the fields he rents at the Camp Pendleton Marine Base near San Diego. His foreman told Serafín Rincón, 61, to pick beside two imported contract workers in their 20s. In the summer heat, Rincón was told to run. He could hardly keep up.

Rincón had come to work with his friends Santiago Bautista and Rufino Zafra They were all longtime farm workers in the area. Bautista had been working in San Diego since 2003, and Zafra since 1975. All day they had to listen to gritos(shouting) and insults from their boss Celerino when they fell behind. "Stupid donkey, you're old now," he shouted at them. "You can't make it anymore!"

The three even started trying to hold it when they had to go to the bathroom, after being yelled at for going too often. Not that using those bathrooms was a pleasant experience. The toilet paper ran out so often they started bringing their own from home. Zafra would even wipe down the filthy port-a-potty with paper towels. The drinking water tasted like "hot soup," Bautista said. He had a heart attack at work, but still the foreman wouldn't let him stop working. A medical examiner said later the attack was caused by his working conditions.

Finally Rincón was fired, and the three sued Harry Singh's company, West Coast Tomato, over the abuse.

Singh was one of the first growers to bring H-2A temporary agricultural workers to California. These young, mostly male workers are recruited in other countries, mainly Mexico. They're given visas that allow them to work in the U.S. but tie them to the employer that recruits them. "Many of the younger workers whom our plaintiffs had to keep pace with were H-2As," explained Jennifer Bonilla of California Rural Legal Assistance. She introduced expert testimony of Dr. Kenneth Silver, who tied the speed-up of the production requirements given the younger H-2A workers. 

CAMP PENDLETON, CA - Behind this gate H2-A guest workers working for grower Harry Singh sleep in a labor camp on Singh's ranch, keeping them isolated from the surrounding community. Guest workers can't leave their jobs without being deported.


The U.S. Department of Labor allows growers to put production quotas into the contracts under which workers are recruited to come to the U.S., and to fire workers for not meeting them. If H-2A workers get fired before the end of their contract, they lose its guaranteed weeks of work and pay. They also become immediately deportable. The grower doesn't even have to pay their transportation to the border, much less to the town they came from.

That gives a grower a lot of leverage to get workers to work at an inhuman pace. And because the H-2A workers can be forced into it, workers who are living in the U.S., and laboring at the same job, get pressured into it as well. Humiliation, firings, and even heart attacks are the result.

The Impact of the Explosive Growth of H-2A

This is just one impact on farm workers in California of the explosive growth of the H-2A guest visa program. Like everything connected to the state's agriculture, it's big business. In 2016-an enormous production of food that has little to do with agribusiness's oft-declared goal of "feeding the nation": Almost half of what's grown here leaves the country in exports worth $20 billion.

Employing at peak season almost three quarters of a million people (719,000 in 2017 in California alone), this enormous industry needs workers. The growth of a captive, low-wage and vulnerable workforce at its heart has a profound effect, not just here, but across the nation.

Growers applied to the U.S. Department of Labor for certification to bring 44,619 H-2A workers into U.S. fields in 2004. Last year the number certified had grown to 200,049-over 450 percent in a little over a decade. California growers brought in 3,089 H-2A workers in 2012. In 2017 that had mushroomed to 15,232-a 500 percent increase in just five years.

The impact of guest workers will grow even more severe if Congress passes a bill (H.R. 4760, Securing America's Future Act) that would not only put H-2A on steroids, but would do away with what little (mostly unenforced) protections currently exist for farm workers, both resident and recruited. Farmworker Justice, an advocacy group for farm workers in Washington, D.C., calls the bill a "virulently anti-immigrant and anti-worker piece of legislation." And four cabinet secretaries in the Trump administration have already promised growers to make the H-2A program more grower-friendly.

Growers claim that because of increased border enforcement, the number of available farm workers is falling, although the industry employed virtually the same number, 724,000, 20 years ago. "There is a severe ag labor shortage, and it's only going to get worse," wrote Tom Nassif, president of the Western Growers Association, on the WGA webpage. "Changing demographics and stringent regulatory barriers are causing the flow of workers crossing the border to dramatically slow down." The Department of Labor estimates that about half of U.S. farm workers are undocumented, and in California the percentage is higher. 

Unemployment in California's farm worker towns, however, is always much higher than in urban areas. In April, for instance, the unemployment rate in Imperial County was 14.4 percent, in Merced County 8.7 percent, and Monterey County 6.7 percent. (In Los Angeles, it was 4.1 percent and San Francisco, 2.1 percent.) Yet according to Nassif, "Increased pay and overtime benefits aren't going to attract any additional workers to the field. Those extra workers don't exist."

In reality, farm wages have been falling since the late 1970s, when the United Farm Workers was at its peak strength, and the base labor rate in union contracts was twice the minimum wage.

In reality, farm wages have been falling since the late 1970s, when the United Farm Workers was at its peak strength, and the base labor rate in union contracts was twice the minimum wage. Even non-union employers had to compete for workers by paying union wages. Today the average wage of California farm workers is just above the minimum wage-$11.68/hour by one estimate. The H-2A program, critics charge, allows growers to keep wages low, giving them an alternative to raising pay to attract labor.

ROYAL CITY, WA- Carlos Gutierrez, an immigrant H-2A guest worker, strings up wire supports for planting apple trees in a Stemilt Company field.


Another CRLA case against Harry Singh dramatized the way West Coast Tomato could pit H-2A workers against local laborers to reinforce low wages and unsafe working conditions. The suit, Espinoza et al. v. West Coast Tomato Growers, accused the company of evading two legal requirements-that it hire local residents before recruiting H-2A workers, and that it pay local workers at least as much as it pays the imported laborers. CRLA's plaintiffs included Elisa Valerio, Guillermina Bermudez, and Felix Gomez, experienced local farm workers employed in the West Coast Tomato packing shed.

Once tomatoes are picked, they're brought into a hot cavernous building where they're sorted on high-speed conveyor belts. The three workers described intense pressure to maintain a very fast work pace, much like what Rincón experienced in the fields. 

Both local and H-2A workers did the same work. West Coast Tomato, however, called the H-2A workers "packers" and the resident workers "sorters." Its application to the Department of Labor claimed it couldn't find local "packers" and therefore needed to fill jobs in the shed with H-2A workers. West Coast would hire only local workers as "sorters."

Then the company paid sorters less than the H-2A wage. This rate, called the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), is set every year by California's Employment Development Department. In 2014 it was $11.01/hour. The three workers, however, were paid the minimum wage-$8/hour until July 2014, and $9/hour afterwards-because they were "sorters" and not "packers."

Both the older local workers and younger H-2A contract laborers had to meet high production quotas. If the line stopped, the three plaintiffs said, the company docked their pay until it began again (a violation of state law). And when it was running they couldn't even leave to use the bathroom. Valerio, Bermudez and Gomez couldn't keep up and were fired in August 2014. 

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Whelan rejected West Coast's classification scheme, saying it allowed the company "to hire H-2A workers as 'tomato packers' without a legitimate shortage of qualified Americans and pay them more per hour than its American equivalent 'tomato sorters.'"

CRLA Litigation Director Cynthia Rice charged, "It's good that we can win these cases and get justice for some workers, but it's a small number compared to the total number of H-2A and affected resident workers in the California workforce."

SALINAS, CA - Migrant farm workers and their supporters march in Salinas to protest immigration raids, in a march was organized by the United Farm Workers.

Part Two next week.

IRAQ ELECTIONS: A STEP TOWARD REBUILDING POPULAR POWER

IRAQ ELECTIONS: A STEP TOWARD REBUILDING POPULAR POWER
by David Bacon
LobeLog/Insstitute for Policy Studies - May 30, 2018
https://lobelog.com/about/

Hassan Juma'a

The U.S. media quickly dismissed the results of Iraq's national elections on May 12. Journalists were puzzled by what the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) might have in common, and even more, by why they garnered more Iraqi votes than any other electoral list.

Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fought the U.S. early in the occupation, and his political base is mostly among poor and disenfranchised Iraqis, especially in Baghdad's Sadr City. This vast neighborhood of 3.5 million people, half the population of Baghdad, was known originally as al-Thawra, or Revolution, built for poor people migrating from the countryside by radical nationalist Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim in 1959. For many years it was a stronghold of the ICP. Later, after the Baathist coup that overthrew Karim Qassim and eventually brought Saddam Hussein to power, it was renamed Saddam City. Then, after the 1999 assassination of Muqtada al-Sadr's father, Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, it became popularly known as Sadr City.

The New York Times labeled Muqtada al-Sadr's partners in the Sairoon coalition "Iraq's moribund Communists, Sunni businessmen and pious community activists." Actually, besides al-Sadr and the ICP, Sairoon (meaning Forward or the Alliance for Reforms) includes the Youth Movement for Change Party, the Party of Progress and Reform, the Iraqi Republican Group, and the State of Justice Party.

Oversimplifying politics and ignoring history, however, is not just a matter of names. It reveals blindness to the long process in which Iraqi civil society has been rebuilding itself, to the popular anger that has motivated this, and to the growing support for the political alternative this alliance proposes.

The 329 parliamentary deputies chosen in the May election will vote for a new prime minister. Sairoon won the most 55 deputies, with 1.3 million votes. It was followed by the Fatah Party of Hadi al-Amiri, whose base rests on militias with ties to Iran, with 47 seats and 1.2 million votes. Voters rejected the parties of both the current Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi (Victory Coalition with 40 seats) and former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (State of Justice Party with 25). Turnout was low, at 44% nationwide and only 33% in Baghdad itself (where Sairoon won 23%, almost twice that of any of its rivals).

The program of the Sairoon alliance calls for an end to the system that divided political positions and government support along sectarian lines, a system imposed by the U.S. after its occupation of Iraq in 2011. Basing a governmental structure on sectarian political parties led to a system of patronage and division of spoils, and consequently enormous corruption. Al-Sadr explained, "I'll say this despite the amama [turban] on my head. We tried the Islamists and they failed miserably. Time to try independent technocrats."

Sairoon also called for independence from foreign domination by the U.S. and Iran. In advance of the election, a senior Iranian politician, Ali Akbar Velayati, visited Iraq and threatened Iranian reprisals if voters chose Sairoon: "We will not allow liberals and communists to govern in Iraq," he said. Many secular politicians condemned the statement as interference in Iraq's internal affairs.

Following the election, because no group got anywhere near a majority, negotiations began between Sairoon and two runners-up, al-Amiri's Fatah bloc and al-Abadi's Victory Coalition. Inside Sairoon this has produced tension between the Sadrists and the ICP. Some coalition members are calling for it to go into opposition rather than agree to power-sharing with parties and politicians still committed to the hated sectarian quotas.

ICP's general secretary, Raid Jahid Fahmi, however, says the Sairoon alliance has a strong natural basis. "The social base is quite close-the social base of the left and the social base of the Sadrist movement," he explained. In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, one of the country's most conservative, voters elected a Communist woman representing the Alliance. Suhad al-Khateeb, a teacher, anti-poverty, and women's rights activist, explained, "We were never agents for foreign occupations. We want social justice, citizenship, and are against sectarianism, and this is what Iraqis also want."

The coalition is more, though, than an agreement between Communists and Sadrists. It developed from a popular civic movement on the Iraqi streets, with roots in protests going back to 2010, and in the growth and popularity of the country's unions.

Iraqi Spring

In summer 2010, as temperatures soared past 120 degrees, Iraqis came out of their homes to protest the lack of electricity. Since the start of the occupation in 2003, U.S. authorities, and later the Iraqi government, have been unable to provide power around the clock, especially during periods of high demand. That failure was due in part to contracts granted by the U.S. occupation to foreign corporations for rebuilding the electrical grid destroyed by the war. Private foreign contractors often sold Iraq equipment incompatible with its own system, and then pulled out. When they criticized reliance on these contractors, the leaders of the new union for the industry's workers were arrested.

Protests continued the following year, 2011. Through February, as Arab Spring demonstrations took place throughout the Middle East, young Iraqis began organizing rallies in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, mostly calling for jobs and better electrical service. They called their actions the Iraqi Spring. One general, Abdul Aziz al-Kubaisi, even tore off his military rank insignias on television and said he was joining young people in the streets. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, just put into power by the U.S., called them all "insurgents and terrorists."

Forty-five people died in the ensuing repression, including 29 on February 25, the Day of Rage. Hundreds were arrested. Protests continued throughout the spring, and on April 9 thousands filled Tahrir Square and streets in other cities. In May, al-Sadr organized yet another demonstration of tens of thousands of people.

Since that Iraqi Spring, Friday has been the day most often chosen for marching in the streets. In 2015, Iraqis began demonstrating every Friday, denouncing the corruption of sectarian political parties, holding it responsible for the crisis in providing electrical power, clean water, and other basic services.

Editors of the Iraqi Civil Society Solidarity Initiative website described those initial 2015 protests:

The demonstrators, mostly youth and civil society activists, challenge the political system as a whole, call for a secular state in opposition to a confessional state, against the division between Sunni and Shi'a populations, [and] for women's rights and workers' rights ... Iraqi women's rights groups are actively working to make sure women can take part in the demonstrations without being harassed." Young people held banners with fiery slogans: "The Parliament and the Islamic State are two sides of the same coin!" "Daesh was born out of your corruption!" "Humans do not survive with religion but bread and dignity!" "In the name of religion, they act like thieves!" And "No to sectarianism, no to nationalism, yes to humanity!"

In April 2016 protestors occupied the Iraqi Parliament building in the Green Zone, demanding an end to the sectarian political system, and left only after government officials promised electoral reforms. Then last year, on February 11, thousands of people began a non-violent march from Tahrir Square to the Green Zone, demanding reform of the electoral commission, charging that it was dominated by the Dawa Party of former prime minister al-Maliki. Jassim al-Hilfi, one of the civil society protest organizers and an ICP leader, explained that participants had three demands: reform of the political system, combating corruption, and provision of services.

Government Special Forces troops, wearing black uniforms, fired on the protestors as they crossed the Al Jumhuriyah Bridge. Nine people were killed and 281 were wounded. Eight of the dead were unarmed, and one was a policeman trying to protect demonstrators from the soldiers shooting them. Joint press conferences by the followers of al-Sadr and the Madaniyoon (Civil) Movement denounced the killings. In subsequent memorial marches people also carried the symbolic coffin of Hadi al-Mahdi, assassinated in 2011 in the Maliki government's suppression of that year's popular rebellion.

Over time, the growing protest movement "provided a program for political reform," according to Benedict Robin, a PhD student in Britain who follows Iraqi politics. "This centered on breaking the grip of sectarianism and party factionalism on governing structures by introducing independent technocrats as ministers. Other proposals included reform of the civil service to set government ministries outside of party political patronage, reforming the electoral law, the judiciary, and issues of economic and social justice."

Role of Iraqi Unions

The demand for non-sectarianism reflects a long tradition in Iraqi unions as well, which have never been organized on sectarian lines. Most, like the powerful Iraqi Federation of Oil Employees, have written non-sectarianism into their bylaws, although pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr can be found in many oil workers homes.

The Iraqi labor movement was organized in the 1920s in the oil industry and among railroad workers, and for decades the country was the most industrialized in the Middle East. Its unions, part of a strong leftwing political culture, helped overthrow the British-installed king and establish Karim Qassim's nationalist and socialist government in the 1950s. That was overthrown in a Baathist coup, and Saddam Hussein eventually took power with the support of U.S. intelligence agencies. He, in turn, suppressed leftwing parties and only permitted weak unions controlled by the government.

That didn't earn the U.S. much loyalty among Iraqi labor activists, many of whom returned from exile after the overthrow of Saddam. Nevertheless, they were prepared to give the U.S. the benefit of the doubt, especially after a wave of assassinations by remnants of the old Mukhabarat secret police allied with rising groups of religious extremists. Under the Bush-era occupation, however, U.S. authorities prioritized the privatization of Iraqi industry, while keeping unions and the left marginalized.

Until 2015 Iraq still had on the books the Saddam Hussein-era Law 150, prohibiting unions among public workers. In Iraq that sector includes the oil, gas, electricity and many other industries. In 2010, the government of Nouri al-Maliki reinforced Law 150 with Ministerial Order 22 244, which held unions illegal under the country's terrorism laws. From the start of the occupation in 2003 until a new law was passed in 2015 workers had to organize despite the illegal status of their unions. The 2015 law gave all workers the right to form unions, except for direct government (civil service) employees and security and police forces, for whom Law 150 still applies. Unions gained collective bargaining rights and the right to strike. Last year the al-Abadi government promulgated a further Draft Law on Professional Federations and Unions, but labor has opposed it, saying it failed to completely guarantee workers' rights.

Hassan Juma'a, head of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Employees, said the draft was "motivated by political forces that do not want the independence of trade union organizations and do not believe in trade union pluralism, especially in the public sector." Nevertheless, earlier this year unions convinced the government to finally ratify ILO Convention 87 on Freedom of Association, which they view as a step towards legislation that will finally guarantee union rights for all Iraqi workers.

In April last year, 3,000 contingent workers in the electrical generation and transmission industry formed a union, after the government failed to pay their wages for five months. They then joined with the union for the industry's permanent workers to form the General Trade Union of Electricity Sector Employees of Iraq. This March, they began a series of demonstrations in Baghdad and Basra. On March 29, the government electrical ministry fired 100 of the union's leaders, saying they'd been absent from work during the previous day's protest. Some had been working in the generating stations for over 10 years. Two days later, workers began sit-ins in power plants across Iraq. Their demands included reinstating the fired laborers, permanent jobs and inclusion in Iraq's Social Security system, and a minimum monthly wage of $300.

On May 18, just after the election, the Iraqi government announced that it would not only include all 30,000 contingent contract workers in the electricity industry in the Social Security system but would guarantee the same rights as those enjoyed by permanent workers to the 150,000 contract workers throughout the public sector.

Hashmeya Alsaadawe, president of the Basra Trade Union Federation and the electrical union-the first woman to head a national union in Iraq-said that the elections had encouraged people to demand that they benefit from the country's oil wealth. "Workers have high expectations," she said. "They have been very active in demonstrations and on social media to demand their rights."

Those heightened expectations and worker demonstrations dealt a blow as well to the World Bank, which had threatened the Iraqi government that it would not grant critical loans without reduced government spending on social benefits. Under bank pressure, last year the Iraqi cabinet then approved a draft social security law that would have increased worker contributions to the funds while raising the retirement age from 63 to 65. "Adoption of this draft will lead to increased poverty among Iraqis, even though they are living in one of the world's richest countries in oil," Alsaadawe charged.

Workers in the critical oil and gas industry in December finally formed a national network of eight previously competing unions. According to Hassan Juma'a, "One of the most important priorities is the unity of the trade union movement in Iraq. We have started the first step in the most important sector, the oil and gas sector. This network gives us a unified force capable of defending workers' rights and protecting national production."

The network's objectives include defending the rights of contingent and migrant workers, who make up a significant part of the industry workforce. Its nationalist spirit is evident in its commitment to "protect national wealth for future generations against capitalist companies that do not respect the rights and opinions of citizens," and "to urge foreign companies to take responsibility for maintaining the infrastructure of areas near oil fields exposed to toxic emissions."

Iraq today has six union federations. One, the General Federation of Iraqi Workers, is allied with the ICP, and another, the Federation of Workers Councils and Union in Iraq, was organized by members of the Iraqi Workers Communist Party. The country's main oil workers union, the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, is independent. The Kurdistan United Workers Union united Kurdish unions in 2010, and the other two federations are smaller groups that existed under Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi unions and federations do not bind their members to support of individual political parties. According to Wesam Chaseb of the AFL-CIO-linked Solidarity Center, "They are the real face of Iraq. There is no discrimination among workers." Unions do not use the candidate endorsement system used by U.S. unions, but some individual union leaders also play roles in political parties, and unions encourage their members to vote for candidates who support workers' demands.

Dhiaa al-Asadi, the director of Muqtada al-Sadr's political office, told the Al-Monitor news website that the Sairoon list is "a reform project that represents the hopes and expectations of deprived and less advantaged people. This project of Sairoon constitutes a paradigm shift and a departure from the established norms that have characterized the political process since 2003."

This combination of street protests, electoral activism and increasing union strength is one of the most important features of Iraq's political landscape, as Iraqis seek to rebuild their country after four decades of war, the deaths of millions of people, and a bitter decade of foreign occupation and domination. A growing progressive alliance, recovering its oil wealth, could make Iraq a country to be envied by its neighbors instead.

Hashmeya Alsaadawe


David Bacon is a photojournalist, author, political activist, and union organizer who has focused on labor issues. He is the author of Illegal People-How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (2008), and The Right to Stay Home (2013), both from Beacon Press.

HAWAI'I - ERUPTION'S AFTERMATH

HAWAI'I - ERUPTION'S AFTERMATH
Photoessay by David Bacon

Every day I look at the photos and videos of the lava overwhelming people's homes in Puna, on Hawai'i's Big Island.  I've stayed in the home of a friend there, which is now undoubtedly covered with molten rock.  My heart goes out to everyone who's lost a home, and to those who've known this beautiful place.

Like many, I've thought also about what Leilani Estates will look like years from now.  The landscape of congealed lava, after an eruption, is desolate and surreal, but in its way, also strangely beautiful.  I post these photos of two places where I've taken photographs to show this, to honor those who now will have to deal with what's happened.

One, Moana Ulu, is a shield volcano on the side of Kilauea, where the eruption began in 1969 and went on for several years.  The other images are of lava in the flow that buried Kalapana and Kaimu in 1990.  In both places, on the congealed lava flow, you see the resurgence of life - fern and coconut seedlings pushing up through the cracks in the crust.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOW FILIPINO MIGRANTS GAVE THE GRAPE STRIKE ITS RADICAL POLITICS

HOW FILIPINO MIGRANTS GAVE THE GRAPE STRIKE ITS RADICAL POLITICS
By David Bacon
Dollars and Sense | May/June 2018
http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2018/0518bacon.html

Francisco and Maria Tapec are Filipino grape pickers in Coachella. Although Filipino workers were a large and important part of the farm labor workforce in the Coachella Valley from the 1920s to the 1970s, very few grape workers come from the Philippines today. Photo by David Bacon

Honoring Larry Itliong and a generation of radicals whose political ideas are as relevant to workers now as they were in 1965.  This article is from the (forthcoming) May/June 2018 issue.  Published today in honor of May Day.


The great Delano grape strike started on September 8, 1965, when Filipino pickers stayed in their labor camps, and refused to go into the fields. Mexican workers joined them two weeks later. The strike went on for five years, until all California table grape growers were forced to sign contracts in 1970. The conflict was a watershed struggle for civil and labor rights, supported by millions of people across the country. It breathed new life into the labor movement and opened doors for immigrants and people of color.

California's politics have changed profoundly in the 52 years since then, in large part because of that strike. Delano's mayor today is a Filipino. That would have been unthinkable in 1965, when growers treated the town as a plantation. Children of farm worker families have become members of the state legislature. Last year they spearheaded passage of a law that requires the same overtime pay for farm workers as for all other workers-the second state, after Hawai'i, to pass such a law.

The United Farm Workers, created in that strike, was the product of a social movement. The strategic ideas the union used to fight for its survival evolved as the responses of thousands of people to problems faced by farm worker unions for a century-strikebreaking, geographic isolation, poverty, and grower violence. The tools they chose, the strike and the boycott, have been used by farm workers ever since.

Every year spontaneous work stoppages like it take place in U.S. fields, although not on that scale. Anger over miserable wages and living conditions led workers in Washington State, for instance, to go on strike four years ago. They then organized the country's newest farm worker union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (see David Bacon, "These Things Can Change," Dollars & Sense, March/April 2015). Combining action in the fields with a boycott of Driscoll's berries, they won their first union contract last year.

In the years since 1965, farm worker unions have grown to over a dozen, in Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania, in addition to California. To one degree or another, all draw inspiration from the movement that started in Delano.

Liberal mythology holds that farm worker unions hardly existed until the creation of United Farm Workers in the '60s and that the farm worker unions and advocacy organizations of today appeared with no history of earlier struggles. But the importance of the Delano strike requires a reexamination of this idea, especially a reassessment of the radical career of Larry Itliong.

Larry Itliong and the Filipino Radicals 

 Larry Itliong. Bob Fitch photography archive, (c) Stanford University Libraries


Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), not only shared the strike's leadership with Cesar Chavez, but actually started it. Chavez was born in 1927 near Yuma, Ariz.; Itliong was born in 1913 in the Philippines-almost a generation before. By 1965 he had been organizing farm workers for many years.

During the 1930s, Filipinos and other farm workers formed left-wing unions and mounted huge strikes. According to Oberlin professor Rick Baldoz, "The burgeoning strike activity involving thousands of Filipinos in the mid-1930s occasioned a furious backlash from growers who worked closely with local law enforcement."

One of the most important people to influence Itliong was Carlos Bulosan, who wrote America Is in the Heart, a classic account of life as a Filipino migrant farm worker during the 1930s. The FBI considered the book dangerous-evidence of the reader's Communist sympathies during the Cold War. Both men were active in the union organized by Filipino workers in the salmon canneries on the Alaska coast. These were mostly single men, recruited from the Philippines to come as laborers in the 1920s. In Alaska, their union fought to end rampant discrimination and terrible conditions, and forced the fish companies to sign contracts.

Known as "manongs," these men were the children of colonialism. From 1898 to 1946 the Philippines was a U.S. colony, and even in the most remote islands, children were taught in English, from U.S. textbooks, by missionary teachers from Philadelphia or New Jersey. Students studied the promises of the Declaration of Independence before they knew the names of Jose Rizal, Emilio Aguinaldo, and Andres Bonifacio, who led Filipinos in their war for independence against the Spaniards, and later against the Americans.

The manongs were radicalized because they compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the Filipinos' own quest for freedom, with the harsh reality they found in the United States. Some even volunteered for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, opposing fascism in the country that was their former colonizer. In Spain, Pedro Penino organized the Rizal Company, named in honor of Jose Rizal.

Baldoz gained access to the file on Bulosan kept by the FBI, which monitored Filipino radicals. "The fact that these partisans attracted the attention of federal authorities during the Cold War is hardly surprising," he says. "Filipino workers had developed a well-earned reputation for labor militancy in the United States dating back to the early 1930s."

Many of the manongs were Communists, believing that fighting for better wages was part of fighting against capitalism and colonialism, to change the system. Bulosan wrote, "America is not bound by geographical latitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of people that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of people building a new world." In 1952 he was hired by leaders of the fish cannery union to edit its yearbook. Among its many appeals for radical causes, it opposed nuclear war and U.S. military intervention abroad, and urged solidarity with the Huk movement in the Philippines, which was fighting continued U.S. domination of its former colony.

Filipino immigrant workers at an organizing rally at the Forty Acres, the historic home of the United Farm Workers. Photo by David Bacon


Until 1949 the fish cannery union, Local 37, was part of the farm workers union of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). As the Cold War started, the CIO expelled nine unions, including UCAPAWA and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), because of their left-wing politics and often Communist leaders. At the height of the McCarthyite hysteria more than 30 members of Local 37 were arrested and threatened with deportation to the Philippines, including its officers Ernesto Mangaoang and Chris Mensalvas, and activists Ponce Torres, Pablo Valdez, George Dumlao and Joe Prudencio.

Eventually Mangaoang's deportation case was thrown out by the courts. He argued that he couldn't be deported, given that he'd been a U.S. "national" since he arrived in Seattle in the 1920s. "National" was a status given Filipinos because the Philippines was a U.S. colony at the time. Filipinos couldn't be considered immigrants, but they weren't citizens either.

Filipino Workers Kept Farm Unionism Alive in the Cold War

Larry Itliong had a long history as an organizer. He was Ernesto Mangaoang's protégé, and was Local 37's dispatcher, sending workers on the boats from Seattle to the Alaska salmon canneries every season. After the salmon season was over, many Filipinos would return home to California's Salinas and San Joaquin Valleys, where they worked as farm laborers for the rest of the year.

In the segregated barrios of towns like Stockton and Salinas they formed hometown associations and social clubs. Itliong used these networks to organize Filipinos when they went to work in the fields, including strikes in Stockton's asparagus fields in 1948 and 1949. At the time, growers kept workers under guard in labor camps, where if they held open meetings, they risked being fired and even beaten. To help the asparagus cutters organize, Itliong would sneak into a camp, crawl under the bunkhouse, and speak to workers through the cracks in the floor.

UCAPAWA was destroyed in the 1949 CIO purge, and the Filipino local in Seattle was taken in by the ILWU. It survived, and today is part of the ILWU's Inland Boatman's Union. The Federal government tried to bankrupt Local 37, forcing its leaders to exhaust their resources on high bail and lawyers' fees. With the radicals tied up in legal defense, a conservative faction took control of the union and stopped its farm worker organizing drives. That group held it until it was thrown out in the 1980s by a new young generation of radical Filipinos, two of whom, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes (a former farm worker) were assassinated by agents of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Yet in the early 1950s Filipino farm workers continued to organize. Ernesto Galarza built an alliance between them and the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the union mounted thirty strikes. Galarza was an immigrant from Nayarit, a poet and writer as well as an organizer. The NFLU struck the giant DiGiorgio Corporation, then California's largest grower, for 30 months, and was eventually defeated. Supporters of the workers made a movie about it, Poverty in the Valley of Plenty, which urged people to boycott the company's fruit. Di Giorgio used its political muscle to have it banned, and sued any organization that tried to show it.

In 1959 the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) was set up by the merged AFL-CIO. After hiring Itliong as an organizer because of his history among Filipino workers, AWOC used flying squads of pickets to mount quick strikes. In 1961, AWOC, together with the United Packinghouse Workers, another leftwing former CIO union, struck the Imperial Valley lettuce harvest, demanding $1.25 per hour.

Growers kept wages low by employing bracero contract labor from Mexico. Under that program growers brought workers under tightly-controlled, highly exploitative conditions. During the strike the U.S. Department of Agriculture threatened braceros that they would be deported if they joined the mostly-Filipino strike. Galarza said, "The state was flooded with braceros while we were on strike. I lost track of the number of times I was thrown out of camps trying to talk with them. If they were seen talking with you they were deported home to Mexico." Despite the threats, however, some braceros joined the strike.

Itliong and the Filipinos in the Delano Grape Strike 

AWOC members picket during the grape strike in Delano. Photo by Harvey Richards, used by permission.


Finally, in 1965, led by Itliong, Filipino workers struck the vineyards in the Coachella Valley, near the Mexican border, where California's grape harvest begins. They won a 40¢/hour wage increase from grape growers and forced authorities to drop charges against arrested strikers. After winning in Coachella, the strikers moved with the grape harvest into the San Joaquin Valley, where their strike was met with fierce opposition.

In Delano, Filipinos workers began sitting in at the camps, refusing to leave to go to work. UFW founder Dolores Huerta described to historian Dawn Mabalon the first days of the Delano strike, saying that she, Cesar Chavez, and other National Farm Worker Association (NFWA) organizers were shocked at grower violence against the Filipinos. "Some of them were beaten up by the growers [who] would shut off the gas and the lights and the water in the labor camps," Huerta recalled. Growers kicked the Filipino strikers out, forcing them to move into town, and Filipino Hall in Delano became the center of the strike. If Delano's mayor today is a Filipino, it's because of what the growers started in 1965.

The timing of the 1965 strike was not accidental. It took place the year after Galarza, Huerta, Bert Corona, Cesar Chavez, and other civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero program. Farm worker leaders knew that once the program ended growers would no longer be able to bring braceros into the U.S. to break strikes. Nevertheless, the grape barons searched for strikebreakers throughout the conflict's five years. From their first picket lines in Delano, strikers watched as growers brought in crews to take their jobs. When braceros were no longer available, often the Border Patrol opened the border, and trucks hauling strikebreakers roared up through the desert every night. Local police and sheriffs provided armed protection.

Both Filipinos and Mexicans wanted to keep growers and the government from using immigration policy against them. Strikers and labor advocates sought policies that would instead favor families and communities. In the 1965 immigration reform, passed the year after the bracero program ended, they established family reunification as a basic principle. This enabled thousands of people, especially family members of farm workers, to immigrate from the Philippines, Mexico, and other developing countries, while keeping employers from treating immigration purely as a labor supply system.

Immigration Reform and the Boycott

Today, President Trump's talk about ending "chain migration" is coded language for trying to do away with family reunification, an achievement of the civil rights movement. Both Trump and growers want to return to a more overt labor supply system in agriculture, based on the H-2A guest worker visa program, much like the old bracero program.

The government uses raids and deportations against undocumented workers, much as it did during the bracero era of the 1950s, to provide a pretext for importing contract labor. ICE audits the records of growers, finds the names of undocumented people, and demands they be fired, while conducting deportation raids in farm worker communities. At the same time, the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security certify grower applications to import a mushrooming number of H-2A contract workers-160,000 in 2016, 200,000 last year, and more predicted for this year.

"ICE uses audits and raids to create fear and anxiety," according to Armando Elenes, vice-president of the United Farm Workers. "People get afraid to demand their rights, or even just to come to work. Then growers demand changes to make H-2A workers even cheaper by eliminating wage requirements, or the requirement that they provide housing."

In 1965, once the threat of replacement by braceros was removed, strikers then built a strategy to force growers to negotiate. Of all the achievements of the grape strike, its most powerful and enduring was the boycott. It leveled the playing field in the fight with the growers over the right to form a union, and kept growers from using violence freely, as they'd done in previous decades. Armed grower militias had killed strikers in Pixley and El Centro, Calif.,in the 30s. Nagi Daifullah and Juan de la Cruz lost their lives in the grapes in the 1973 strike. Rufino Contreras was shot in a struck lettuce field in the Imperial Valley in 1979.

Non-violence, as urged by Cesar Chavez, was not universally accepted, however, especially by Filipino labor veterans. According to Mabalon, "Many of the members of the Filipino union, the AWOC, were veterans of the strikes of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s and were tough leftists, Marxists, and Communists. They met the violence of the growers with their own militancy, and carried guns and knives for self-defense. For them the drama of marching behind statues, hunger strikes, turn-the-other-cheek style was alien."

The boycott couldn't end grower violence entirely, but after farm workers crossed the enormous gulf between the fields and the big cities, they didn't have to fight by themselves. The political philosophy shared by most Filipino workers saw the strike as the fundamental weapon to win better conditions. Nevertheless, they could also see the boycott's power, and for several years during the strike Itliong was the national boycott organizer. This strategy gave new energy to the rest of the union movement, and led to the most powerful and important alliance between unions and communities in modern labor history. Today, similar alliances are the bedrock of progressive tactics among union activists across the country, helping to give labor struggles their character as social movements.

Cesar Chavez and Pete Velasco.  Photos by David Bacon


Filipinos and Mexicans: Uneasy Allies

Growers had pitted Mexicans and Filipinos against each other for decades. The alliance between Itliong's AWOC and the Cesar Chavez-led NFWA was a popular front of workers who had, in many cases, different politics. AWOC's members had their roots in the red UCAPAWA. NFWA's roots were in the Community Service Organization (CSO), which was sometimes hostile to Communists. Yet both organizations were able to find common ground and support each other during the strike, eventually forming the UFW.

Eliseo Medina, a farm worker who later became vice-president of one of the country's largest unions, the Service Employees, remembers: "Before the strike began, we lived in different worlds-the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world. We co-existed but never understood who we were or what each other thought and dreamed about. It wasn't until the union began that we finally began to work together, to know each other and to begin to fight together."

Cold War fears of communism obscured the contributions of Itliong and the Filipinos. In his famous biography of Cesar Chavez in The New Yorker, writer Peter Matthiessen claimed: "Until Chavez appeared, union leaders had considered it impossible to organize seasonal farm labor, which is in large part illiterate and indigent..." In reality, many Filipino workers in Coachella and Delano were members of ILWU Local 37 in 1965, when the grape strike began. Every year they continued to travel from the San Joaquin Valley to the Alaska fish canneries. Through the end of their lives, they were often active members of both unions-Local 37 and the United Farm Workers.

But relations between Filipinos and Mexicans deteriorated after the grape strike. In the first UFW table grape contracts, won in 1970, the hiring hall system broke up the Filipino crews. These were, in effect, communities of single men who'd worked together for 30 or 40 years. Accusations of discrimination against Filipinos in hiring halls were widespread. Many Filipino leaders were foreman, with a tradition of bargaining for their workers with growers to win better wages and working conditions. Itliong mostly organized through them, to get whole crews on board. The 1970 contracts stripped away their powers. Some supported the Teamsters, who offered those foremen their power back during that union's raid on the UFW in 1973. But the most pro-union Filipino workers, including ones who had been foremen, stayed with the UFW. Relations grew even more difficult when Cesar Chavez visited dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. He then tried to use the Philippine consul in San Francisco to win over Filipino workers in UFW organizing drives. UFW vice-president Philip Vera Cruz resigned. Itliong had left even earlier. "Differences between the leadership and the rank and file in organizing styles and priorities, philosophies of organizing, and strategy began to pull the coalition apart," Mabalon says. Pete Velasco, however, one of the original AWOC leaders, stuck with the UFW, and was an executive board member when he died in 1995, two years after Chavez.

Conditions of Farm Workers Today

Overdependence on boycotts in the 1980s and 90s had a high price. In the fields there were few elections and even fewer strikes. As a result, Medina says, "Workers today are back where they were before the union. Most are working at minimum wage again. Employers are back to just trying to get the work done in the cheapest way possible, regardless of the impact on workers."

At the height of the union's power in the late 1970s the base farm wage was twice the minimum wage. Today that would be over $20 an hour. Doug Adair, a young white activist when the grape strike began, got a union job in the fields and worked there the rest of his life. He remembers, "When I worked under that first contract our wages and benefits were over double the minimum wage of American workers. We had a health plan that was the envy of many other unions. We could sit down with the growers and bargain over grievances. We wouldn't always win, but we could negotiate our working conditions."

California has a law recognizing the right of farm workers to form unions, and another that requires growers to negotiate first time contracts-both products of UFW political action. In the last decade those laws enabled the union to regain contracts where workers voted for it years ago. Today workers under union contract can enforce state restrictions on pesticide use and requirements for better safety conditions. Contract wages aren't what Adair remembers, but they're significantly higher than the farm labor average.

Nevertheless, today many workers earn less than the legal minimum, law or no. Growers tore down most labor camps in California in the era of the great strikes. As a result, thousands of migrant field laborers sleep under trees, in cars, or in the fields themselves as they travel with the harvest. Most workers have toilets and drinking water, and where they know their rights, they don't have to use the short-handled hoe, which caused debilitating back injuries to generations of farm workers before it was banned in California. But labor contractors, who were once replaced by union hiring halls, have retaken control of the fields. And as contractors compete to sell the labor of farm workers to the growers, they cut wages. Because contractors have the power to give work or to fire workers, the problem of sexual abuse in the fields has become rampant. They demand sex from women who need a job to support their families, or simply allow daily humiliation.

The lack of safe working conditions was dramatized by the death in 2008 of 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, who was denied shade and water and collapsed in 100-degree heat. The low value put on her life and that of workers like her was also dramatized-by the sentence of community service given by the state court to the labor contractor responsible. West Coast Farms, the grower, wasn't penalized at all, because it claimed the contractor was responsible for conditions in its grape field.

Rufino Dominguez, Mixteco migrant leader, talks with men who worked in the U.S. as braceros in the 1950s. Photo by David Bacon
 

A New Generation and the Legacy of Radicalism

But just as Larry Itliong followed the migration of Filipino workers from Seattle to Alaska and then back to California, the migration of workers today is offering similar opportunities to farm worker organizers. An upsurge among indigenous Mexican farm workers is sweeping through the Pacific coast. Work stoppages by Triqui and Mixteco blueberry pickers led to the organization of their independent union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia in Washington State. In the San Quintin Valley of Baja California, thousands of blueberry and strawberry pickers walked out for three weeks in 2015, organizing an independent union as well. In 2016 at the beginning of the blueberry picking season, indigenous Mexican workers at Gourmet Trading near Delano refused to go in to pick, and voted 347 to 68 for the UFW. Last year they signed their first union contract.

The indigenous Mexican workers in all of these strikes come from the same towns in Oaxaca, Puebla, Guerrero, Chiapas, and Michoacan. They get the worst pay. According to the Indigenous Farm Worker Study, the median family income in 2008 was $13,750 for an indigenous family and $22,500 for a mestizo (non-indigenous) farm worker family. Neither is a living wage, but the differential reflects structural discrimination against indigenous people.

Activists and organizers in the movement of people from Oaxaca have radical politics and a history of activism, just as Mangaoang and Itliong did. One UFW organizer in McFarland, Aquiles Hernandez, from Santa Maria Tindu, belonged to the leftwing caucus in the Mexican teachers' union, was fired and imprisoned for 72 days.

Indigenous organizer Rufino Dominguez used migrant community networks to organize agricultural strikes in Mexico and later in California. Some of his ideas came from indigenous culture and the politics of leftwing organizations in Mexico. But some also came from the farm workers movement in California, with roots going back to those Filipino activists.

Thousands of people learned the skill of organizing in the grape strike and its aftermath. One of them, Rosalinda Guillen, helped organize FUJ and worked many years for the UFW. She says, "Today farm workers can organize because of what other farm workers did in the 60s and 70s in California. This is one of the most important legacies of Larry Itliong and Cesar Chavez, this coming together of different workers with different religions and different political views."

In Trampling Out the Vintage, Frank Bardacke calls Itliong "a veteran old-style unionist [who] did not have the language of democracy in his arsenal." Yet Itliong spent a lifetime organizing workers in radical fights against growers. His contribution, and that of his generation of Filipino radicals, should be honored-not just because they helped make history, but because their political and trade union ideas are as relevant to workers now as they were in 1965. Those ideas, which they kept alive through the worst years of the Cold War, helped lead a renaissance of farm labor organizing that is still going on today.